OomphHQ

The New iPad hits OomphHQ – WOW!

March 22nd 2012.

Yesterday, the Oomph marketing and design departments got our hands on the New iPad. Wow!

I was in two minds about whether the new retina display would really make that much of a difference that I’d need to upgrade. It didn’t take long to convince me. After flicking through some of our Oomph magazines such as the new Qantas iPad magazine and compared it side by side to the iPad 2. It’s like wearing new contact lenses that you didn’t know you needed! The text is so clear and the photographs so crisp. Even some of our earliest Gourmet Traveller iPad magazines circa June 2010 look phenomenal (with no changes required).

Oomph magazines look like this due to the fact that the Oomph digital publishing system is based on resolution independent formats like PDF and HTML and because these files are vector based, you can blow them up to any size and they will not distort. These resolution independent assets are combined with rendered assets such as images and video to create fully interactive pages. The new iPad will automatically scale these formats to match the screen resolution. With Oomph, text is clearer, sharper and easier to read.

Oomph Design Director Erica van der Walt agrees, “The text literally pops off the page, PDF based text and graphics that are used in the majority of our magazines get enhanced so much more. It’s the little things, like shadows on a font. To replicate that in an image you would need a file almost quadruple in size.”

Moving forward, publishers can take further advantage of the New iPad by increasing the resolution of the rendered assets to match the new retina pixel density. This will have an affect on file size, but as these images are not used as the main content format, Oomph publications are not affected by the retina display to the same degree as other publishing platforms that rasterise pages to PNG files (rasterise means turn something into an image). These need to be increased in size to look as good and who wants to download a 2GB magazine?